When History reflects the Present as much as the Past
Every historical period has its own knowledge system and people can't help but be entwined within these systems.
By DAVID MYTON
No matter how objective and accurate historians strive to be, they can’t help but be influenced by current social, cultural and intellectual trends. In their quest to understand the past their work will often reflect contemporary concerns.
To try to illustrate this I refer to a book called The Living Past: A Sketch of Western Progress by Francis Sydney Marvin.
Marvin was a senior scholar of Classics and History at the University of Oxford in the late 19th early 20th centuries. This erudite man was a passionately committed teacher, especially of history, and was well respected within his distinguished Oxford peer group.
You can still find some of his books being bought and sold online today.
The Living Past is a triumphant tale of human progress from what Marvin terms its “childhood” in ancient times to “maturity” in the early 20th century – a century, in his view, abounding in potential and promise.
He couldn't have been more wrong.
The Living Past was published in 1913 just a few months before the catastrophe of World War One and all of the turmoil that followed.
In this book Marvin looks deep into the past and observes mankind’s constant progress from primitive ancient times to the splendidly sophisticated 20th century.
For Marvin, history is the account of “man’s achievements” and in particular those of “the western leading branch of the Human family which now dominates the globe” – words no historian would write today I would suggest.
Clearly impacting his thinking is Charles Darwin's theory of evolution formulated in The Origin Of Species By Means Of Natural Selection, published in 1859 – a massively influential book.
Now it seemed natural to Marvin to apply, or misapply, Darwin's theory of evolution to individuals, cultures and societies.
“Civilised man,” Marvin writes, “has so vastly greater story of knowledge than the Savage that the latter seems by comparison to be as naked in mind as he is in body”.
Knowledge, power, social unity and organisation have clearly developed over time and can be traced back to prehistoric times, he says.
Marvin uses the word Savage here in a Rousseaun sense - people living in a “state of nature” rather than dwelling in towns and cities. In this context all people were Savages before they became civilised - that is, living in cities.
Marvin characterises the people of ancient prehistoric times as “children” who “mature” over the ages as they develop languages, tool making, domesticate animals, artistic expression, and eventually the discipline of science.
He gives great weight to the achievements of the people of ancient Greece and Rome, for example, in philosophy, poetry, and art.
He writes: “Looking back as far as the eye can penetrate the mists of early Rome we see there in language, national character, laws and religion, the germs of those principles of action and policy to which at every point in their triumphant progress their success was demonstrably due. It was clearly a case of perfect suitability between the developing organism and its environment.”
For Marvin, the Roman Empire “was in essence the embryo of the modern world, and Europe and the West today are Rome enlarged”.
There are a few hiccups in the Middle Ages, but progress continues - swept along by the Renascence, Reformation, the rise of printing, exploration and the discovery of the New World, and the laying of the foundations of modern science.
These movements, he says, “have a close interrelation and common roots in the general awakening of men’s minds in Western Europe, and all of them tend … to the common end of a united human force, subduing and civilising the world”.
The achievements of Great Men feature throughout this book and the likes of Socrates, Plato, Shakespeare, Descartes, Beethoven, Wordsworth, Napoleon Copernicus, Leibnitz, Newton, and Columbus were “lighting the way ahead for the rest of humanity”.
Another very optimistic book is The Arts of Mankind by Hendrick Wilhelm Van Loon, a Dutch-American historian and journalist, first published in 1921 with charming illustrations of historical figures by Van Loon himself
Van Loon paints an optimistic picture of human progress - like Marvin – emerging from darkness into the light of modernity.
“We live under the shadow of a gigantic question mark,” he writes – “who are we, where do we come from, and wither are we bound?
“Slowly, but with persistent courage, we have been pushing this question mark beyond the horizon where we hope to find our answer. Man was the last to come but the first to use his brain for the purpose of conquering the forces of nature.”
The book is pitched at young people and he tells interesting stories without condescension, but it's not difficult to see that it would not resonate well with many modern people today because it can be perceived as - and probably actually is - a Grand Narrative of Western achievement that occludes as much as it illuminates.
There are many more such books from this era, and they are now easy to criticise even though they were well-received at the time.
But it is important to remember, I think, that when we are judging history and historians, each of us at any time inhabits what the sociologist Alfred Schultz calls “the assumptive world” - the things we presume that must be the case, including categories of good and evil, true and false, what is polite, what is rude, etc - and this world changes over time and place.
Every historical period has its own knowledge system and people can't help but be entwined within these systems.
Authors Sonke Neitzel and Harald Welzer point out that it is only in retrospect that developments appear inevitable and compulsory. And it's only in retrospect that historians determine which events from a massive inventory of possibilities were historical - that is, significant for the eventual way things turned out.
A physical body will always fall according to laws of gravity and never otherwise, they write, “but what other human beings do they could always have done differently”.
And that's what makes studying history so fascinating.
REFERENCES
J Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, British Broadcasting Corporation, London, 1973.
F S Marvin, The Living Past: A Sketch of Western Progress, Oxford University Press, 1913.
Hendrik Willem Van Loon, The Arts of Mankind, George Harrap & Co, 1938.
Sonke Neitzel & Harald Welzer, On Fighting, Killing and Dying. Soldaten. The secret WW11 transcripts of German PoWs, Random House, 2012